How It Is

most of the people the doctor says will never walk again

don’t become Olympic gold medalists;

not very many left-behind pets

persist a hundred miles over fields and busy freeways

to scratch scraggly and joyous at the door

of the family’s new place;

as a general rule halfhearted students who fail algebra

don’t become pioneering astrophysicists; but

when it comes to falling in love

all of the clichés are true.

The Empty Chair

It wasn't so much
that she missed him

as that his absence
made itself felt. . . .

The Darkest Hour

The darkest hour is not just before the dawn.  It may be a pretty, poetic notion to say so, but anyone who has even a smattering of astronomical knowledge, or is the least bit acquainted with the night, will recognize it as preposterous.  The darkest hour is exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise, on that slice of Earth which is facing directly away from the sun.  It takes half a night to get so deeply into darkness, and another half a night to get back.

Of course, during the first half of the night, the sky is growing steadily darker, and during the second half, it is growing steadily lighter.  It might be more accurate, then, to say that the darkest hour is just before the resurgence of the light.  That is not only correct, but logical, even to the point of being rather too obvious to bother mentioning.  After all, the very definition of darkest requires everything else, in every direction, to be brighter, if only a little.

I can't help but think that's why we celebrate the hiemal solstice, the calendar's own midnight, the darkest hour of the year (and celebrate it we do, nearly all of us, whether we know it or acknowledge it or not).  On the surface, it seems odd for primitive agricultural societies to have celebrated the beginning of winter.  Of course, there was an element of desperation involved; many solstice festivals contained an entreating or propiatory component, to effect the return of the sun with its life-sustaining light and warmth.  The common folk-belief that "like produces like" accounts for the prevalence of candles, bonfires, and other sources of warm illumination in the imagery and festivities of winter celebrations.  What it doesn't account for is the sheer joy of these celebrations, the hope and goodwill and ebullience that distinguish solstitial traditions from Inti Raymi to Yalda.  The months follwing the winter solstice were the hardest time of the year for our ancestors.  Harvest was over, and hunting was difficult; whatever had been stored away would have to last, and if crops had been poor or the winter weather continued longer than expected, starvation was a very real threat.  Even if there was plenty of food stored away, staying warm was always a challenge.  How could anyone find joy in celebrating the beginning of that?

Of course, it wasn't the hardships of the months to come that they were celebrating at all, but the "return" of the sun.  If the sun at his (or her) most remote chose to continue on further into distant realms, forever forsaking the people, they were surely doomed.  The beginning of winter, the cold and cruel season in which every night is a little shorter than the night before, promised the inevitability of spring, and it was this that inspired such festivity.  It's easier to sit tight through the worst, when you know something better is surely on its way.

The darkest hour is just before the resurgence of the light.  As obvious as that may be, isn't it true that we forget that sometimes during the long dark nights of our own souls?  The moment things are at their very worst is the moment they begin to get better.  And sometimes something ugly and ineffective has to be stripped away to make room for what is beautiful and right.

Winter is here.  Spring is inevitable.  Let's keep our eyes open and watch it come.

Let Me Love You While I Can

I wrote this song when I was in high school.  It's typical of the songs I wrote back then - fatalistic, abjectly devoted, and chock-full of words like "frangible."

I don't want to waste this moment
You are tangible and near
I wish time could stop forever
You would linger with me here
You swear you'll always love me
But I cannot ignore
How words can be so volatile
I've been hurt too much before

CHORUS:
So let me love you while I can
For a lifetime or a day
With all the power I possess
Cherish you in every way
Let no good deed go undone
Let no kind word go unsaid
Let me love you while I can
And the future lies ahead

There's so much I want to tell you
So much you have to see
I want to give a gift to you
Of all the best in me
I want to sing a song to you
Of joy without refrain
Wrap wreaths of flowers 'round your head
And bear away your pain

CHORUS

I don't want to wait
Procrastinate
And find to my dismay
We won't have the love tomorrow
That we know we have today
Let's savor every second
Leave nothing for regret
The better things that might have been
The heart cannot forget
So let's leave nothing for regret

CHORUS

I don't want to waste this moment
You are tangible and near
There's a lifetime in this moment
Love is frangible, but here

Let me love you while I can
Let me love you while I can
Let me love you

Hamlet in the Hospital

One of the books I happened to have with me during my first stay in a hospital psychiatric unit was a volume of Shakespearean tragedies, but it would seem that, despite my suicidal depression, I was in more of a dryly comedic frame of mind.  Plagued by insomnia and lack of appetite as side effects of my new medication, my intelligence insulted by the banality of the literal-minded professionals around me who offered a chemical solution to everything, I found myself envying Hamlet, whose purported "madness" was regarded with a certain awed solemnity, and whose suicidal crisis constitutes one of the best-known and most poignant passages in all of literature.  I doubted even the melancholy Dane would be taken seriously in the modern mental-health system.  With the play in hand, I sat down to vent my frustrations in parody.  Nearly every line in this is lifted directly from Shakespeare, with a few obvious tweaks . . . and what isn't Shakespeare was borrowed almost verbatim from conversations I seemed to have on a daily basis in the hospital.

SCENE ONE: Dining room, Elsinore.

(Ophelia, Prince Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, King Claudius, and Polonius are seated around a circular table, eating breakfast.)

HAMLET (to Gertrude): Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th'unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?

GERTRUDE: I would!  The pleasures of life are so much greater than the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

HAMLET (to Ophelia): Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?

OPHELIA: I would, my lord!  Of course I would!

POLONIUS (to Claudius): Your noble son is mentally ill.  Mentally ill call I it, for, to define true mental illness, what is't but to be nothing else but mentally ill?  That he is mentally ill, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.  You would do well to start him on an antidepressant.

SCENE TWO: Courtyard, Elsinore.  Two hours later.

(Hamlet stands alone in the courtyard.  Claudius and Polonius watch him secretly from around a corner.)

HAMLET: To be, or not to be - that is the question.

(Hamlet unsheaths his dagger.  Before he can plunge it into his chest, Gertrude walks into the courtyard and Hamlet quickly restores the dagger to its sheath.)

POLONIUS: He's a danger to himself.  I recommend that you confine him where your wisdom best shall think.

CLAUDIUS: It shall be so.  Mental illness in great ones must not unwatched go. (He exits.)

HAMLET (with a sudden start): A king of shreds and patches - save me and hover o'er me with your wings, you heavenly guards!  (To the air in front of him)  What would your gracious figure?

GERTRUDE: Alas, he's mentally ill.  To whom do you speak this?

HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?  Nor did you nothing hear?

GERTRUDE: Nothing at all.

HAMLET: Why, look you there!  Look how it steals away!  My father, in his habit as he lived!

GERTRUDE: This is the very coinage of your brain.  This bodiless creation psychosis is very cunning in.

CLAUDIUS (re-entering): How does Hamlet?

GERTRUDE: Mentally ill as the sea and wind when both contend which is the mightier.

CLAUDIUS: His liberty is full of threats to all, to you yourself, to us, to every one, and especially to himself.  If anything should happen, it will be laid to us, whose providence should have kept short, restrained, and out of haunt this mentally ill young man.

GERTRUDE: But so much was our love we would not understand what was most fit, but, like the owner of a foul disease, to keep it from divulging, let it feed even on the pith of life.

CLAUDIUS: Hamlet, for thine especial safety, which we do tender, we must send thee hence with fiery quickness.  Therefore prepare thyself.  The ambulance is ready, the paramedics tend, and everything is bent for the hospital.

SCENE THREE: A small conference room in the psychiatric ward of the hospital.  Later that day.

(Hamlet and a doctor sit facing each other.  Hamlet's sheath is empty; the dagger was taken away and put in a storage room.)

DOCTOR: Hamlet, do you know why you're here?

HAMLET: I will tell you why.  I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire - why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.  What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!  And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

DOCTOR: Will you sign yourself into the hospital voluntarily?  (Offers Conditional Voluntary Hospitalization form.)

HAMLET: Gentlemen, with all my love I do commend me to you.  (He signs it.)

DOCTOR: You'll probably have to stay here for a couple of weeks while you're getting stabilized on the medication.  We're going to put you on Zoloft for depression and Risperdal for psychosis.

HAMLET: Psychosis?  My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time and makes as healthful music.  Just ask the nurse who took my vital signs earlier.  It is not mental illness that I have uttered.  Bring me to the test, and I the matter will reword, which mental illness would gambol from.

DOCTOR: Okay, here's the test.  Tell me what you see in this inkblot.

HAMLET: Do you see this mark that's almost in shape of a camel?

DOCTOR: Hmmm . . . show me.  Ah!  By th' mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.  Here's another one.  Tell me what you see.

HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.

DOCTOR: Where?  Indeed, it is backed like a weasel.

HAMLET: Or like a whale.

DOCTOR: Very like a whale.  Now how about this one?

HAMLET: That's a hawk.  No . . . wait . . . I think it's a handsaw.  Or is it a hawk?

DOCTOR (nodding his head several times in a self-satisfied way): Hamlet, you are mentally ill.  Do you wish to know how you have been diagnosed?

HAMLET: I am tame, sir; pronounce.

DOCTOR: Major Depressive Disorder, severe, with psychotic features.

HAMLET: Is't possible?

DOCTOR: Our time is up.  My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.

HAMLET: You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal - except my life, except my life, except my life.

DOCTOR: But can you contract for your safety?

HAMLET: I do not set my life at a pin's fee, but conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.  So, unfortunately, yes.

SCENE FOUR: The conference room.  Two weeks later.  (With apologies to Macbeth.)

(Hamlet and a counselor sit facing each other.)

COUNSELOR: Do you know me, my lord?

HAMLET: Excellent well.  You are a fishmonger.

COUNSELOR: Not I, my lord.  I'm a counselor.  We met last week.  How does my good Lord Hamlet?

HAMLET: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

COUNSELOR: So I take it things could be better.

HAMLET: O God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!  Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed.  Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

COUNSELOR: What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET: Between who?

COUNSELOR: I mean, why are you so unhappy?

HAMLET: I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thought to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.  What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?  To die, to sleep - no more - and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. . . .

COUNSELOR: But, Hamlet, you have so much to live for.  You're a student at one of the finest universities in Europe, and you're next in line to the throne of Denmark.  I don't understand why a young man who has so much going for him would want to die.

HAMLET: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.  To me 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

COUNSELOR: I understand your father passed away not quite two months ago, and you're still quite upset about this.  How is it that the clouds still hang on you?  Thou know'st 'tis common.  All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.

COUNSELOR: If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?

HAMLET: Seems, madam?  Nay, it is.  I know not "seems."

COUNSELOR: Let's not bicker over words.  'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, to give these mourning duties to your father.  But to persever in obstinate condolement is a course of impious stubbornness.

HAMLET: He was so excellent a king, so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.  Heaven and earth, must I remember?

COUNSELOR: We can change the subject, if you like.  How have you been responding to the medications?  Have you noticed any difference?

HAMLET: Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!  Zoloft does murder sleep" - the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.

COUNSELOR: He's still hearing voices!

HAMLET: Still it cried "Sleep no more" to all the house; "Zoloft hath murdered sleep, and therefore Hamlet shall sleep no more, Hamlet shall sleep no more."

COUNSELOR: Who was it that thus cried?  You do unbend your noble strength to think so brainsickly of things.  Go get some water and I'll have the doctor give you some Risperdal.

HAMLET: My appetite is much decreased, too.  But what is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?  A beast, no more.

COUNSELOR: I have to go now.  Is there anything else you want to say?

HAMLET: The time is out of joint.  O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!

COUNSELOR: Ah!  A delusion of exaggerated self-importance!

Houdini

It was my dog who taught me
to love being alive on Earth,
to poke my nose with limbic abandon
into the good greenliness of the wild's unstudied
garden, throwing myself to the ground
under the sky and rolling on the earth as if
to get closer, to make contact with the teat
of something warm and long-forgotten:
so staggered by richness as to be helpless
and pained and greedy for the abundance
of abundance, all at once . . .

and it was my dog who taught me
to be content with sustenance and covering,
living as she did on the cheap dry kibble my father bought,
sitting quietly on the floor beside the table when we ate
though usually she had nothing for her pains,
but when she did get a bit - she had a special fondness
for bananas - she licked the very last trace
of it from the giver's fingers, and if you wanted to
anthropomorphize you could pretend it was gratitude.
She never had a bed of her own, but should a pillow
or blanket fall to the floor she would never fail
to enjoy a little luxury while it was there.

And as far as this very day,
when I bruise my senses trying to distinguish
the world God so loved
from the world that we're in but not of
(and friendship with which is enmity with God)
and I look in the mirror and see whole universes waiting in my eyes
I run to the hills
and smell the holy-incense of flowers in heat
or fallen leaves fermenting for a deep winter's
nepenthe: and the sun pierces the stained-glass
leaves of the silent cathedral, and I remember
how to love being alive on Earth.

For it was my dog who taught me
the secret of the heavens that tell the glory
of the one who created them:
to be passionately in love with the perfection that lingers
in all the corrupt and desolate things,
for this is the simplest way to love God,
and the delicate channel that nourishes all the others.

Sleeping Together

No, I don't mean making love.  I mean sleeping together.  Pulling back the covers and lying down and kissing a little and then closing our eyes, side by side.

I hadn't imagined just how much I would enjoy it.  I love waking in the warm cocoon of the blankets and reaching for him in the dark and finding him there.  I love the way he sleeps, the strength I so adore etched upon his brow while his mouth hangs open with a touching vulnerability.  Sometimes I kiss him when he doesn't even know it, on the cheek or the back of the head or against the unresponsive lips, and I breathe in his softness, this piece of him so private that even he has never seen it, maybe never even thought to wonder if if it was there.

Most often we lie spoon-fashion, his belly pressed into my back, his arm around me.  Sometimes he drapes it over me with casually possessive affection; other times, the best times, he grips me tight and draws me in until I feel all wrapped up in his being, his breath and his love and the smell of his skin.  Once he held me that way all morning, mostly awake as I drifted up and down through the tight warm layers of consciousness for over an hour before I rolled over and kissed him and the gentle caress of his hands turned fierce and hungry and demanding.

Sometimes we face each other, settling down to slumber after the final kiss and the last murmured endearment.  He nearly always falls asleep long before I do, so many nights I have watched it happen, sharing his pillow and feeling the warmth of his exhalations across my cheek and nose, and only then do I turn over, rousing him for only a second as I snuggle back against him and close my eyes.

When he has to work, he rises and turns off the alarm and gets ready to go while I swim in a drowsy haze, opening my eyes for his kiss and then rolling over to his side of the bed to snuggle into the pillows still warm and fragrant with the novelty of his absence.  After the sun comes up and the heaviness of the dying night has passed over my eyes, the bed seems terribly shabby and lonely without him.  Sometimes I actually sleep better for the rest of the morning if I move out to the living room couch.

And all through the night, the delicious chilly night that we float through together in our private pocket of warmth, the love within me rises and falls like a heartbeat: sometimes a quiet ebb, a presence in the back of my mind, feeling its way clumsily into my stormy dreams; other times loud, swelling, blossoming in me like a glorious golden flower: I love him, I love him, I love him!  And I press myself closer against him and remind myself that this is one dream I get to hold onto, and I am complete.